Perhaps not since Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” has New Yorker fiction gone as viral as “Cat Person.” (And what did “viral” even imply in 1948?) Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 brief story a few faculty scholar’s courtship with an older man spoke to legions of ladies who shared it on social media, touching off fierce debates about courting and sexual etiquette.
The creator received a seven-figure e-book deal. In 2021, “Cat Person” landed within the highlight once more: A lady wrote an essay in Slate accusing Roupenian of appropriating particulars of her actual life and relationship. The story grew to become the middle of a firestorm of questions on how a lot fiction writers owe to the reality.
Meanwhile, “Cat Person” grew to become an indie movie directed by Susanna Fogel (“The Flight Attendant,” The Spy Who Dumped Me), which premiered final 12 months on the Sundance Film Festival. Now you possibly can see it on Hulu.
The deal
College scholar Margot (Emilia Jones, the likable star of CODA) meets thirtysomething Robert (Nicholas Braun) on the movie show the place she works. She texts her good friend Taylor (Geraldine Viswanathan) to say he appears like the perfect good friend character in a Judd Apatow film. This doesn’t deter her from flirting with him.
Awkward in person, Robert is extra charming by textual content, and Margot will get hooked on their each day exchanges, ready for amusing updates on his cats. True, when Robert reveals up on the archaeology lab the place she works, he spooks her, unintentionally killing the queen of the ant colony that her professor (Isabella Rossellini) has spent years cultivating. And Margot simply would not get his obsession with Han Solo as an icon of cool.
Taylor, who moderates a Subreddit known as the Vagenda, sees Robert as poisonous masculinity incarnate. But, on a go to home, Margot’s mother (Hope Davis) opines that compromise is important to relationships with males, and Margot’s friends all appear to be sexually confused or busy getting wasted. So Margot makes an attempt to take issues with Robert to the following degree.
It would not go properly.
Will you prefer it?
Fans of the story could also be startled to see Cat Person categorized on Hulu as a thriller. The suspense component seems to be, basically, padding to fill the two-hour run time. Fogel and screenwriter Michelle Ashford could have hoped that, by inserting Roupenian’s transient slice-of-life story into the framework of a feminist thriller within the vein of Gone Girl, they might additionally make the movie marketable to a broader viewers than the one which reads New Yorker tales.
Cat Person opens with an oft-quoted (really paraphrased) sentiment from Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that girls will chortle at them. Women are afraid that males will kill them.” This thesis is an efficient method of splitting the distinction between a critique of gender relations and a thriller, and it provides viewers a key to understanding the story’s most infamous scene, an extremely unsexy but consensual sexual encounter. For those that surprise, Why is she going together with that?, the implicit menace of violence is their reply.
That terrible intercourse scene can also be the strongest within the film. Staged as a surreal dialogue between Margot and several other dissociated items of herself, it elicits the precise degree of cringe it ought to. Equally insightful and humorous (in a twisted method) are the scenes during which Margot makes use of fantasy to delude herself about her romantic chemistry with Robert — as an illustration, imagining him discussing her together with his therapist. Though we do not get Robert’s perspective, we will intuit that every of them is interacting primarily with a model of the opposite one they’ve invented. Such are the hazards of on-line communication.
But is Robert only a self-involved dork, or is he harmful? Fogel teases the latter risk with scenes of menace that develop into in Margot’s creativeness. While we grasp her causes for being afraid, these fake-outs get old shortly. The added subplot within the lab is ham-handed (although Rossellini’s hamming is at all times welcome), and the filmmakers give the story a brand new climax and denouement that muddle its message with out placing something concrete or satisfying in its place.
In brief, Cat Person is a genuinely tense, discussion-worthy movie so long as it sticks near its supply materials. When it would not, it wobbles and wanders. Although Braun provides a spot-on efficiency because the form of man who thinks he is “good” — till he is not — the thriller materials feels imposed and parodic quite than rising organically from his character.
It’s a disgrace, however not less than the variation preserves the uncompromising core of “Cat Person.” Let’s be pleased about small favors: No one has tried to show the story into a unusual rom-com.
If you want this, attempt…
Fresh (2022; Hulu): While Cat Person performs with horror and thriller parts, this darkish (and typically ugly) comedy commits to them. A young lady sick of courting apps thinks she’s discovered the right associate — solely there is a catch.
Smooth Talk (1985; Criterion Channel, Kanopy, rentable): For one other instance of an influential brief story about gender relations and violence tailored to movie, attempt Joyce Chopra’s model of Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” — starring Laura Dern and the late Treat Williams.
Booksmart (2019; rentable): Fogel cowrote this intelligent, touching comedy about two nerdy teenagers as much as no good. If you want your comedies from a feminine Gen Z perspective much more outrageous, attempt Emma Seligman’s Bottoms (2023; MGM+, Prime Video) and the disturbingly hilarious Shiva Baby (2020; Max, rentable).
